


that's my boy

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-09
Updated: 2009-11-09
Packaged: 2017-10-30 22:15:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/336735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>August, 1993.</p>
            </blockquote>





	that's my boy

**Author's Note:**

> Done for the 2x5obsessions prompt, "news", the 30 fics for 30 fabulous women challenge, and robin_3570_hood, who prompted me with, "happy. yellow. driving at night." only contains general spoilers. you can read it here or [@ LJ](http://antistar-e.livejournal.com/446247.html?format=light).

0.

August, 1993. She wears the same sweater six days out of the week. Sundays, she washes it, sits in the laundry room in just a cami and makes a desk for herself with her legs, hooking ankle over knee as she does homework and her clothes tumble dizzy and punch-drunk. There are holes at the cuffs, where she sticks her thumbs through and tucks her sleeves up under her chin when she sleeps at night. 

It hasn't smelled like her grandmother for years, but in the dark, she can pretend.

 

1\. 

A friend, outside McDonalds. A sort-of friend, anyway -- a girl from her high school scholarship course, who greets her with a hug, curved apathetic so she doesn't spill her coffee. She has disco balls for earrings and hair that smells like a salon, and she pulls back, looking surprised.

_Are you --_ she starts.

Sally smiles, curves a hand around her belly. 

You can't tell, really.

 

2.

They pick up lunch from a street vendor. The girl doesn't have anything but a credit card, so Sally pays, says no problem, you'll just have to buy me lunch someday.

She says this to a lot of people, more than once. They always forget it's their turn, the next time.

But Sally will take just that: the promise of a next time, tucked into her wallet in between the thin, folded bills.

 

3.

Her stomach hurts. 

She crumples at the sink, soap suds running down her forearms. It's too hot. There's no air.

_Do you have someone we can call?_ the manager asks, pressing a soda can to her forehead. Its sweat mingles with hers.

Sally shakes her head, doesn't want to think about it -- absurdly, the only thing she cares about is that she wasn't done scrubbing the dishes. She should get back to that: Gregoir always gets really red-faced when he has no clean plates, and he makes everyone miserable without trying.

Her manager sighs, gives her a twenty, and sends her out through the back door.

There's a cab at the curb, bright yellow against the rain-muted grey and greens of the city.

 

4.

_I do not know what's going on,_ says the cabbie, voice abrupt, too loud. He set the radio when she got in and let it have the conversation for him -- it's the first he's spoken. She startles. _Not often is traffic this bad. Something must had happened._

She casts a smile at the side of his face. His cheeks are flushed from the strain of carrying the summer heat. His turban sits askew from where he wiped his forehead earlier.

_What's your name?_ she asks.

A look in the rearview mirror. _Jacob._

Her smile widens. _Your real name._

_... Kushbuu._ His cheeks flush nutmeg. _It is a girl's name, I am aware. My parents were not expecting another boy. They had no boy's name picked out for me._

She laughs. Unbuckles her seat belt and leans forward, wrapping her arms around the passenger seat. _It's okay. I like it._

 

5.

The manticore ignores the red light, tromping right through the intersection.

It explains the traffic jam, at least.

A boy staggers, hits the concrete hard. A car squeals over him, all four wheels missing him by inches, and he scrambles to the other side of the street. The manticore bellows and gallops after him. He's missing a sneaker and is more stumbling than running, blood bright on his mouth. He cannot be a day over thirteen.

_Hm,_ says Sally.

She gets lucky. A tour bus barrels right in front of the manticore. Whatever the mortals see through the Mist is fascinating, and to the sound of camera shutters, Sally throws open the door to the cab, grabs the boy by the scruff of the neck, and yanks him inside.

 

6.

The manticore is not amused.

 

7\. 

The sun sets, leaving only bright bands of color left in the sky.

Kushbuu has prayed to every major god he knows, and now is starting on the minor ones, just for extra insurance. He is crushed up against the driver's side door, surrounded by his bobble-heads and other loose particles, looking like he desperately wished he'd picked some other career.

The boy -- whose name, they learned somewhere past Madison Avenue, is Craig -- sips at a water bottle Kushbuu had pulled out of the glove compartment for him. His face is the same color of stale oatmeal.

Sally wonders, idly, if the meter is still running. She doesn't think the manager's twenty will cover this.

 

8.

_You are a demigod, aren't you?_ she asks. There is no air for breathing.

She has always been able to see it, them, everything. Gods, their monsters, and the half-children, but he's the first one she's met since she knew the truth of what she grows underneath her heart.

The car is sideways. Craig braces himself uncomfortably against the back of the passenger seat so that he doesn't fall on top of her, grip slipping with every step the manticore takes.

_Kind of,_ he shrugs. _Sure, I'm a half-god, if you're going by quantity. But I'm more, like, a half-blood once removed. My parents are both half-bloods. Usually I don't attract monsters on my own. I just got lucky today._

_You ... did your parents go to Camp Half-Blood?_ The name feels as strange on her lips as it does familiar. She's never said it out loud.

Lines appear in Craig's forehead. _How'd you know that?_

Her head thumps back against the window. Her stomach hurts.

 

9.

You wouldn't be able to tell, not really. She's only gained ten pounds, in the end. She hasn't even gone up a pant size, and the sweater covers so much.

She never wanted to wind up alone.

 

10.

Eventually, the manticore seems to remember that it's carrying the cab like a little girl towing a ragdoll. With a bellow, it tosses them to the ground. The front fender hits first, shatters and swings wide as all four wheels strike; it hangs in front of them like an exclamation mark. Or a lance.

_Kushbuu, floor it!_ she yells.

He may not see the manticore through the Mist, but he sees the opportunity when it's laid out in front of him.

Their front fender spears it through the chest; half-man, half-bull disintegrates into dust.

_Congratulations,_ says Craig to Kushbuu, after. _You've just slayed your first monster._

_Nnngngnn,_ says Kushbuu.

 

11.

He gets lost trying to drive them home. She doesn't think "how to handle travel by manticore" was ever in the cabbie 101 course, and doesn't really blame him.

One headlight broke on impact, so the yellow cab lists one-eyed across abandoned roads. They seem to have been dropped in the one stretch of Long Island that doesn't have a single road sign. It's full-on dark now, black breathing into the edges of their vision, bringing with it the cool breath of a wind.

Sally can't feel it -- her hair is caked with sweat underneath her scarf.

That's when it strikes; the abrupt, overwhelming need to push.

 

12.

At fifteen, there was this boy. A college representative from NYU who sat on one of the bean bag chairs in the sophomore lit room during lunch. 

At fifteen, Sally's grandmother was still alive -- someone else was still doing her laundry and paying utilities. She could afford to sit in the sophomore lit room during lunch and fold the creases of the NYU brochures between her fingers, with nothing more to worry about than whether or not her legs were smooth, or if maybe she was laughing too loud.

That boy is out there, somewhere still, with his hair curling around his ears in shades of autumn and his eyelashes too unfairly long, and wherever he is, he has Sally's virginity.

The other day, she couldn't even remember his name.

 

13.

But.

Even so. Even on the pill, even with contraceptives, even doing everything she could to play it safe.

Poseidon, remorseful. _Yeah. We're cursed like that._

He was gone before she was even a month along.

 

14.

She is eighteen.

She gives birth in the back of a taxi cab.

 

 

15\. 

Kushbuu keeps a pair of barber's scissors in the glove compartment for those days he's in a hurry and doesn't have time to trim his beard before leaving home. Showing a strength of character she didn't know he had, even when he was spearing a manticore with a car, he cuts the umbilical cord for her.

Craig grabs a rolled up copy of the New York Times from the bottom of the cab, and they wrap the baby in the pages from the middle sections, where they're the cleanest and the warmest. They have nothing else.

Fear is a lack of a heartbeat, lack of a breath, a single static moment in which Sally whispers, _oh, gods, no, please._

The baby kicks.

The baby cries.

Sally bursts into tears.

 

16.

She touches a fingertip to the end of his nose and wonders how she ever could have been afraid of this. Not a normal child, sure. He will never be normal, but how -- even for one second -- could she have thought he meant less than any other boy. She'll meet whatever happens next head-on, for him.

_Can I hold him?_ Craig asks, voice soft.

_No,_ she replies, her son a warm weight in her arms. _My baby. Get your own._

They laugh, and Sally tucks this moment away, too, as something too bright and too happy to look back on too often.

 

17.

So.

August, 1993.

A cab-driver, a half-blood once removed, and a girl with a baby wrapped in newspaper make their way to New York City.

 

 

-  
fin


End file.
